3. House of the Beast by Michelle Wong

 A TBR.co recommendation. This one bills itself as a dark fantasy of revenge and a twisted romance. It's not inaccurate. Fantasy novels often have a sort of optimistic feel to them. Even the more somber ones convey the idea the heroes will pull through in the end. That's not the case with this one. It's darker or grittier. I spent about a third of the novel convinced the protagonist was going to end up dead in the end.

Alma is a child born out of wedlock in a world where magic is born into families who have made a covenant with one of four gods. Alma and her mother have no need for her estranged family even though they are judged by their neighbors. Being born out of wedlock is bad enough, but Alma is also uncommonly strong and has a violent streak when provoked. Nevertheless, they are happy. At least they are until Mom gets sick. Alma, desperate to save her mother, reaches out to her estranged father. 

It turns out that her father is one of the heirs of House Avera. He's vessel of the Dread Beast. He offers to save Alma's mother, but the price is her arm and Alma's life with her. Alma, of course, agrees and the rest of the novel is filled with political intrigue as the vessels of the four gods eagerly await the fall of the next god.  

The gods themselves seem to be beings who fall from the heavens and land on earth with the express purpose of gaining access to the human plane. The four existing gods want to maintain their territory and so the vessels all attempt to kill the newly fallen god. It's an unusual set up and intriguing on its own. This is a richly developed world with details that hint of a larger landscape with countries who are not so influenced by the four gods. This seems like a novel that could easily be the beginning of a series. 

I give this one top marks for world-building and it was an engaging read. However, it also left me feeling unsettled. I'd definitely consider picking up another Michelle Wong book, but I don't know that I could ever contemplate rereading this one.

2. My Salty Mary by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows

I've been working through this series for a couple of years. Thomas and Ryan tracked them all down for me after I watched, and fell in love, with the first book in the series My Lady Jane. Strictly speaking, the six books are split in two series: three books for three different historic and literary Janes and three for three similar Marys. My Salty Mary is the last of them. I've finished the series. It's always a bitter-sweet experience to finish off a series that you've loved. 

My Salty Mary is a fictionalized alternate history based around one of the women pirates during the Golden Age of Piracy: Mary Read. In this version of her life, her story is combined with the story of the Little Mermaid. In this version, when the little mermaid is rejected by her prince she doesn't turn into sea foam the way everyone assumes she will. She has the opportunity to return home, but instead, she tosses herself into the ocean on a fit of despair and is rescued by a pirate crew who assume she is a boy because of the way she is dressed. She adopts a human name and an alias for her disguised self.

It turns out that she's pretty good at being a pirate. Only her best friend Tobias knows that she's a girl and even he doesn't know that she used to be a mermaid. It's pretty clear that Tobias has a crush on her, but after her experience with a vapid prince, she has no interest in love. It's a swashbuckling adventure with brawls and dastardly plots, but at it's core it's a really sweet love story wrapped around a coming of age narrative.

Of the six books in the series, this is one of my favorite. The internal conflict felt compelling and I really liked the way the authors incorporated various elements of pirate history into the story. Anyone who like the Pirates of the Caribbean series is likely to enjoy this as well.

1. The Portable Door by Tom Holt

 Streaming media is one of the wonders of the new century. When I think back to my childhood, access to movies and shows was so much more limited. Waiting for new episodes was a torture and having free access to a movie usually meant buying each title individually which was expensive. These days, subscription streaming services give us ready access to massive catalogs of material. With all of that media, it's ridiculous to think that it still somehow feels like there's nothing available worth watching which leads to scrolling aimlessly through lists of title cards. 

It was during such a time that I tripped across a movie titled "The Portable Door." I'd never heard of it before, but it looked appealingly silly. It's a story about a young man named Paul Carpenter who is sort of drifting through life. He's out of school and it's time to find a job but he doesn't really have any skills or even goals really. It's a surprise to him, in fact, when the venerable old company J.W. Wells & Co. hires him after a lackluster interview. He has no idea what the company does, but a jobs a job. Right?  Sure. Only, why is it they lock everyone out after 6 PM and why is it that the long stapler keeps wandering off? Why is the receptionist a different person each day? There are a lot of mysteries that come with this job.

Silly it was, but in a fun way that made it clear that it had to be based on a book. Sure enough, it was based on a Tom Holt novel of the same name. 

I finally got around to reading the novel. While the movie is clearly based on the book, there are plenty of differences in the plot. Being British humor, the pacing is a little slow and many of the changes in the movie serve to move the story along. That being said, there's something to be said for the slower pacing of the book. There is much more character development and the background romance makes a great deal more sense. 

This is the beginning of an 8 book series. I'm planning to give the next one a try but I'm a little worried about getting bogged down in the pacing, so I'll spread them out

January Recap

 January went by in a flash. It really seemed like we just celebrated the new year yesterday and somehow a month has gone by. My reading rate has recovered somewhat and I'm averaging about a book a week. It's still nowhere near where it was, but it feels good to settle back into a new rhythm. 

The Dekalb Public Library has announced their reading challenge for the year: 26 in '26. It's similar to last years century challenge but on a smaller scale. It shouldn't be to hard to complete. The list contains 52 categories, but a person only needs to complete 26 of them to be considered 'finished.' Needless to say, I'm going to try to fill in all 52.

I have to admit, I miss my monthly lists a little. It was a comfortable organizational habit, but it also made picking my next book relatively easy. I decided to move away from the monthly lists because they also tended to kill whim and spontaneity.  It feels a little strange being 'unmoored,' but strange could be good. 

Below are the list of books that I read in January. I think I'm going to try to go back to consistent reviews. Since I'm reading fewer overall, I should be able to manage it.

Books Read in January

1. The Portable Door by Tom Holt
2. My Salty Mary by Cynthia Hand, et al
3. House of the Beast by Michelle Wong (TBR.co 
4. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (100 books List)

The 100 Books I've Never Read but Really Should Have

 By it's nature, this is an odd list. The only requirement for a book to make it on the list is that somehow I feel like I should have already read it. A few of these, I've actually read large chunks of already. No joke, I've actually read all but the last chapter of 1984...twice. Some of these books are on here, because multiple people have just blithely assumed that I've read and a couple are on here because I mistakenly assumed that I've already read them and I'm addressing the error. 

So, it's a weird list. The goal is to read 2 of these each month. 25 of them read in 2026 is the win. 

The 100:

1. The 1,001 Arabian Nights
2. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
3. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
4. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
5. Persuasion by Jane Austin
6. A Long Way Home by Ishmael Beah
7. Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear
8. Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
9. The Decameron by Boccacio
10. The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle
11. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
12. Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
13. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
14. The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton
15. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
16. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
17. The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
18. On the Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
19. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
20. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
21. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
22. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
23. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
24. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
25. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
26. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
27. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
28. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
29. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
30. The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner
31. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
32. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
33. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
34. The Magus by John Fowles
35. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskill
36. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
37. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
38. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
39. Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
40. She by H. Rider Haggard
41. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
42. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
43. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
44. White Lotus by John Hersey
45. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
46. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
47. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
48. Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
49. The Castle by Franz Kafka
50. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
51. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
52. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
53. Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
54. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre
55. In a Glass Darkly by Sheridan Le Fanu
56. Pachinko Min Jin Lee
57. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (Finished 1/24/2026)
58. Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel
59. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
60. The Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
61. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
62. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
63. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
64. Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell
65. House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
66. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
67. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Morena-Garcia
68. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
69. IQ84 by Haruki Murakami
70. Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov
71. Ringworld by Larry Niven
72. Witch Girl by Andre Norton
73. 1984 by George Orwell
74. The Metamorphosis by Ovid
75. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
76. The Bell Jar  by Sylvia Plath
77. "Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe
78. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
79. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
80. American Pastoral by Philip Roth (Abandoned January 2026)
81. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
82. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
83. Contact by Carl Sagan
84. The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
85. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
86. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
87. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
88. I Am Cat by Natsume Sōseki
89. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
90. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
91. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
92. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery
93. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
94. War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy
95. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
96. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
97. Breakfast of Campions by Kurt Vonnegut
98. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
99. Thank You, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
100. Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

New Year 2026

 Happy New Year, Everyone!

It has been a crazy year for me. I graduated from grad school at the end of the previous year, became a Dean of Instructional Development, and then jumped into being the assistant principal mid-way through the fall semester. A lot of my personal goals fell by the wayside in all of that. However, I was still able to read 72 books over the course of the year and I successfully started a running habit (although, I've been off it for about 2 and a half weeks at this point). It was a good year when judged by several metrics.

I'm hoping that 2026 is just as good but maybe a little less hectic. Professionally, my biggest goal is to settle in to my new position and develop some more specific goals.

Personal Goals:

Reading: 

1. I've put together a list of 100 books that I should have read, but somehow haven't. It's a highly personal list and runs heavy to classics. Many of titles are either very dense, very long, or both which accounts for why I haven't read them yet. The goal is to read at least 2 of them each month. I don't think it's feasible to think that I will polish off the list in one year, but I'll consider anything over 25 of them a win. 
2. Because of the size of the books on my list, my goal for the year is only 50 books. I will be reading books outside the list for sanity's sake and also doing Dekalb Library's 26 in '26 challenge.

Health:

1. Running - Back to Running at least 4 mornings a week. I was managing this most of the way through the fall, but fell off right before the holiday break. More specifically, I'm trying to get the 150 of moderate activity recommended by the American Heart Association. 
2. Screen Time - I've deleted all the games off my phone that aren't something I could do with paper and pencil. It occurred to me how much time I'm losing to games that aren't even winnable, they just take up time. I download them, play them obsessively for a week or so, and then delete them. It's a completely pointless waste of time that I will forgo for the year. (crosswords and similar puzzles are safe) 

Family:

1. Family Dinnertime - 5 nights a week, I'd like us to each dinner at the table without screens. There's no real reason we don't do this, we've just fallen into bad habits. However, there is something to be said for time where we only have each other's company for entertainment. I already cook the meals, so it's really only an issue of setting the table.
2. Weekly activities. For a while there, we were doing a good job of playing board games and going on outings. It's hard to keep it going... or rather, it's easy to let it lapse. I want to make sure we a doing something every week this year. It doesn't have to be huge, but it does have to be as a group. So, board games, trips to the zoo, walks in the park, etc. 

Ok, that's it! I'm trying for achievable goals this year and I think all of these are doable!

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

 Some books are just fun. Of Monsters and Mainframes is what would happen if you snatched up all the B-movie horror monsters from the 70's and 80's and tossed them into space on a ship driven by an AI. Demeter, the AI, has one job: get the ship from point A to point B while keeping the humans alive. She's not responsible for humans going crazy or their missteps, but when all 350 of them die without her having any record of how it happened, it raises some questions. 

When it happens a second time? and a third? well it's no wonder if the AI starts getting a little eccentric. Poor Demeter. 

The public outcry is enough to deal with, but the other ship's AIs make fun of her and call her ghost ship. The company says they'll scrap her, but she's too valuable to scrap. Instead they keep rechristening her with new serial numbers and sending her back out with new passengers who invariably end up dead. 

Demeter tries everything she can think of to break this bloody streak of bad luck. She even consults Steward, the medical AI, and puts up with her somewhat judgy assessments of Demeter's competency. 

In the end there's not a whole lot Demeter can do. If you can't beat the monsters... join them. 

My Imaginary Mary by Hand, Aston, & Meadows

 I love the series. I do. There is something satisfying about an alternate history laced through with magic and other fantasy elements. This one is loosely based off the lives of Mary Shelly and Ada Lovelace. I'm pretty that in reality they never met (and Mary Shelly was like 2 decades older than Ada) but the authors cheerfully ignore such inconvenient faces. Viva la plot! (and all that)

The story is about their friendship united as they are by a mystical fae heritage and a similar loathing of idiot boys and their rakish ways. It's fun and once I got into it, I enjoyed it. It didn't pop as well as the Mary Queen of Scots and Lady Jane Grey books did. However, I'm wondering if the fault there lies in me. I'm way more read up on the lives of various royalty of the British isles in a way that I am not when it comes to later less regal personages. It's possible that it didn't pop for me because I'm just not as familiar with the subject material.

It's hard to say. 

Regardless, it was a pleasant read. 

November - Changes

 It's 11 days into November and there's no list. Things have changed. I have been recently been acting as interim Assistant Principal at my school and it very much looks like the change will become permanent. While it seems like nothing should really change in terms of my free time, I am not reading as much and the big lists don't feel as productive. So I am, at least for this month, going to flip it around. Instead of putting together a huge to read list, I'm going to list here the books that I finish in the month.

1. Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross (11/11/2025)
2. My Imaginary Mary by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows (11/24/2025)
3. Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove (11/25/2025)
4. Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner by Judy Melinek, M.D. and T.J. Mitchell (11/26/2025)
5. Witch of Wild Things (11/27/2025)

October List

 Why does it always seem like time flies by? September went by in a flash. I did manage to read 4 books including a fun little romance set in a town that owes it's serene 1950's style wholesomeness to a pact with "the Dark." That one was a lot of fun and I hope that Huff continues to write in that world. I also read the graphic novel that was the basis for the netflix series "I Am Not Okay with This" which I didn't like. That's not fair. It was very good at getting to the point it was trying to make. It was just utterly bleak and I'm not into that so much in my literature.

Goal for the month is picking up the pace. There are a lot of library books on the list this time and about 19 of the books fill slots on the Dekalb 100 book Century Challenge. (That's what all those CC numbers are for). I'm only at about 40 of the 100 categories, so I'd have to read about 20 books every month that fit into the categories to finish before the end of the year. This is unlikely, to say the least. But hope springs eternal I guess.

October List

1. *Bears Discover Fire by Terry Bisson (CC-97)
2. *Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Library - CC89)
3. *In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (NF - CC 5)
4. Science Experiments You Can Eat by Vicki Cobb
5. The Expanse Series by James S.A. Corey
1. Leviathan Wakes (Finished 1/9/2025)
2. Caliban's War (Finished 1/25/2025)
3. Abaddon's Gate (Finished 3/31/2025)
4. Cibola Burn (Finished 6/28/2025)
5. *Nemesis Games (CC-78)
6. Babylon's Ashes
7. Tiamat's Wrath
8. Persepolis Rising
9. Leviathan Falls
6. Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford (NF)
7. *Thornhold by Elaine Cunningham (CC55)
8. Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
9. Mary Series by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, & Jodi Meadows
1. *My Contrary Mary (CC51)
2. My Imaginary Mary
3. My Salty Mary
10. *Neil Patrick Harris: Choose your own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris (Library - CC10)
11. Act your age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert (Finished 10/10/2025) 
12. J.W. Wells & Co. Series by Tom Holt
1. The Portable Door
2. In Your Dreams
3. Earth, Air, Fire and Custard
4. You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But it Helps
5. The Better Mousetrap
6. May Contain Traces of Magic
7. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages
8. The Eight Reindeer of the Apocalypse
13. *The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes (Library - CC90)
14. *The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam by Omar Khayyam (Library - CC 45)
15. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
16. Arrows of the Queen by Mercedes Lackey (Finished 10/2/2025)
17. Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD: a scientifically proven program for parents by Eli Lebowitz
18. Working Stiff: Two years, 262 bodies, and the making of a medical examiner by Judy Melinek (Library - CC21)
19. *Learning America: One Woman's Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children  by Luma Mufleh (Library - CC57)
20. *The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (Library - CC8)
21. *Six Wild Crowns by Holly Race (Library - CC81)
22. Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid (Library)
23. *Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross (Library - CC65)
24. The Ruin of a Rake by Cat Sebastian (Finished 10/4/2025)
25. The Writing Rope by Joan Sedita (NF)
26. Dear Manny by Nic Stone (Library)
27. The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (Library)
28. Cook as You Are by Ruby Tandoh
29. *Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove (Library - CC84)
30. *Witch of Wild Things by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland (Library - CC9)